Sometimes
it seems as if modern humanity were rushing headlong towards this goal
of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this,
it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence qua subjectivity,
into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is
valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where preserving this
value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe.

We must insist over and over that what is at stake in the question of
truth as raised here is not simply an alteration of the previous
concept of truth, nor a supplementation of the usual representation,
but a transformation of humanity itself.

We are attempting to learn thinking. The
way is long. We dare take only a few steps. If all goes well they will
take us to the foothills of thought. But they will take us to places
which we must explore to reach the point where only the leap will help
further. The leap alone takes us into the region where thinking
resides. We shall therefore take a few practice leaps right at the
start, though we won’t notice it at once, nor need to…In contrast
to a steady progress, where we move unawares from one thing to the
next and everything remains alike, the leap takes us abruptly to where
everything is different, so different that it strikes us as strange.
Abrupt means the sudden sheer descent or rise that marks the chasm’s
edge. Though we may not founder in such a leap, what the leap takes us
to will confound us.

The more
original a thought, the richer its unthought becomes.

How…is it still possible to preserve a tradition which may have to
survive underground for a long time?

Maybe history and tradition will fit smoothly into
the information retrieval systems that will serve as a resource for
the inevitable planning needs of a cybernetically organized mankind.
The question is whether thinking too, will end in the business of
information processing.

Science is the new religion.

[Science is] to a quite unimaginable
degree, through and through dogmatic; dealing with un-thought-through
conceptions and preconceptions.

Physics as physics can make no assertions about physics. All the
assertions of physics operate after the manner of physics. Physics is
not itself the object of possible physical experiment.

Phenomenology is more of a science than
natural science is.

This is especially true if one
understands science (Wissenschaft) in the sense of primordial
knowledge (wisdom).

…it seems necessary to characterise our entirely different method as
specifically
engaging in our relationship
to what we encounter…In a sense, what is characteristic of
phenomenology is the will not to resist this engaging-oneself.

The relation that constitutes knowing is
one in which we ourselves are related and in which this
relation vibrates through our basic posture.

…what is knowable and what is known are each determined in their essence
in a unified way from the same essential ground. We may not separate
either one, nor will we encounter them separately. Knowing is
not a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of
a stream, but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the
banks and turns them towards each other in a more primordial way than
a bridge ever could.

When it
is claimed that brain research is a scientific foundation for our
understanding of human beings, the claim implies that the true and
real relationship of one human being to another is an interaction of
brain processes, and that in brain research itself, nothing else is
happening but that one brain is in some way ‘informing’ another. Then, for example, the statue of a god in the Akropolis
museum, viewed during the term break, that is to say outside the
research work, is in reality and truth nothing but the meeting of a
brain process in the observer with the product of a brain process, the
statue exhibited. Reassuring us, during the holidays, that this is not
what is really implied, means living with a certain double or triple
accounting that clearly doesn’t rest easily with the much faulted
rigour of science.

We
hear,
not the ear…Of course we hear a Bach fugue with our ears, but if we
leave what is heard only at this, with what strikes the tympanum as
sound waves, then we can never hear a Bach fugue…if we hear,
something is not simply added to what the ear picks up; rather what
the ear perceives and how it perceives will already be attuned (gestimmt)
and determined (bestimmt) by what we hear, be this only
that we hear the titmouse and the robin and the lark…Our hearing
organs…are never the sufficient condition for our hearing, for that
hearing which accords and affords us whatever there really is to hear.

The same holds true for our eyes and
vision. If human vision remains confined to what is piped in as
sensations through the eye to the retina, then, for instance, the
Greeks would never have been able to see Apollo in a statue of a young
man….

If
we take thinking to be a sort of hearing and seeing, then sensible
hearing and seeing is taken up and over into the realm of nonsensory
perception…In Greek such a transposing is called metaphorein.
The language of scholars names such a carrying-over “metaphor”. So
thinking may be called a hearing and a listening, a viewing and a
bringing into view, only in a metaphorical sense. Who says “may”
here? Those who assert that hearing with the ears and seeing with the
eyes is genuine hearing and seeing.”

The
essential realm in which biology moves can never be grounded in
biology as a science.

We
cannot say that the organ has capacities, but must say that the
capacity has organs….capability, articulating itself into capacities
creating organs characterizes the organism as such.

The significance, indeed the necessity of the genetic approach is clear
to everyone. It seems self-evident. But it suffers from a deficit
which is all too easily and therefore all too often overlooked. To be
in a position to explain an illness genetically, we need first of all
to explain what the illness in itself is.
It can be that a true understanding of the essence of anillness…prohibits all causal-genetic explanation….Those who
wish to stick rigidly to genetic explanation, without first of all
clarifying the essence of that which they wish to explain, can be
compared to people who wish to reach a goal, without first of all
bringing this goal in view. All explanation reaches only so far as the
explication of that which is to be explained [ie the nature and
meaning of anillness].

Whoever insists on a genetic explanation without first of all bringing
to light the essence of what needs to be explained is like a man who
wishes to reach a goal without having previously brought the goal
itself into view…What good is all explaining if what has to be
explained remains unclear? Or does one indeed hold the mistaken view
that what is unclarified in
itself could ever be clarified by a [genetic] explanation.

You cannot heal a single human being, (not) even with psychotherapy, if
you do not first restore his relationship to Being.

A disposition can confine man in his corporeality as
in a prison. Yet it can also carry him though corporeality as one of
the paths leading out of it.

Modern man must first and above all find
his way back into the full breadth of the space proper to his essence.
That essential space of man’s essential being receives the dimension
that unites it to something beyond itself…Unless man first
establishes himself beforehand in the space proper to his essence and
there takes up his dwelling, he will not be capable of anything
essential within the destining now holding sway.

We always go through spaces in such a
way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near
and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the
lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I
were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this
encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the
room, and only thus can I go through it.

Where is the boundary of the body?
“Every body is my body.”

When
I direct someone towards a windowsill with a gesture of my right hand,
my bodily existence as a human being does not end at the tip of my
index finger. While perceiving the windowsill….I extend myself
bodily far beyond this fingertip to that windowsill. In fact, bodily I
reach out even further than this to touch all the phenomena, present
or merely visualised, represented ones.

We know by now a great deal –
almost more than we can encompass – about what we call the body,
without having seriously thought about what bodying is. It is
something more and different from merely ‘carrying a body around
with one’.

The bodying of life is nothing
separate by itself, encapsulated in the ‘physical mass’ in which
the body can appear to us…

Feeling is the very state, open to itself, in which we stand related to
things, to ourselves and to the people around us…Feeling is the very
state, open to itself, in which human being hovers.

What we call feeling or mood…is more reasonable – that is, more
intelligently perceptive – because more open to Being, than all
reason…which was misinterpreted as being rational.

Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that
embodies in this or that way.

A mood makes manifest ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is faring’. In
this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its There.

In all pleasure – and not just in pleasure – in every mood there
lies a sort of play.

…all conventional, objectifying representations of a capsule-like
psyche, subject, person, ego or consciousness in psychology and
psychopathology must be abandoned in favour of an entirely different
understanding. The new view of the basic constitution of the human
being may be called Da-sein or being-in-the-world. Of course, this Da does not mean what it
does in the ordinary sense – a location near an observer. Rather, to
exist as Da-sein means to hold open a domain through its capacity to receive-perceive
the significance of the things that are given to it by virtue of its
own ‘clearing’ (Gelichtetheit).

How are other human beings present? Are they related to other humans as
you are related to a glass on water on the table in front of you?

Being-here as an existing
human being is always one and the same as being-there with you.

Why is love beyond all measure of
other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one
who has been struck by it?Because
we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves.
Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would
do it adequately.
We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude
into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the
Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret.Closeness here is existence in the greatest
distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve
- but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but
“incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the
presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no
feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate,
and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital
as on the first day.

Freedom is only to be found where there
is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden
always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon
man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All
creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are
clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it
or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this
is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.

As a creative and essential activity of
human being, philosophy stands in the fundamental mood of melancholy.

Philosophy, then, is not a doctrine, not some
simplistic scheme for orienting oneself in the world, certainly not an
instrument or achievement of human Dasein.
Rather, it is this
Dasein itself insofar as it comes to be, in freedom, from out of its own ground.
Whoever, by stint of research, arrives at this self-understanding of
philosophy is granted the basic experience of all philosophizing,
namely that the more fully and originally research comes into its own,the
more surely is it "nothing but" the transformation
of
the same few simple questions. But those who wish to transform must
bear within themselves the power of a fidelity that knows how to
preserve. And one cannot feel this power growing within unless one is
up in wonder. And no one can be caught up in wonder without travelling
to the outermost limits of the possible. But no one will ever become
the friend of the possible without remaining open to dialogue with the
powers that operate in the whole of human existence. But that is the
comportment of the philosopher: to listen attentively to what is
already sung forth, which can still be perceived in each essential
happening of world.And in such comportment the philosopher enters the core of what is truly
at stake in the task he has been given to do. Plato knew of that and
spoke of it in his Seventh Letter:

"In no way can it be uttered, as can other things,
which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential
dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the
fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there
to grow, alone with itself."